Shirl's Drive In

Jenny's here! Jenny's here!

But you would never know that I'm that excited about it since I took nary a picture of her....Jen, help me out...

She decided spontaneously to fly in from Charlotte for the weekend. So I'm not the least surprised that dinner tonight became a bit of an adventure. These things seem to happen to us.

We were driving up to Zion for a womens' retreat, planning to grab something to eat along the way. Our plans seemed to be foiled as we drove along a country-looking road with not much around but Wally World (that's my dad's name for Wal* Mart), which prompted us to brain storm possible dinner like items we might maybe perhaps be able to get from Wally. We weren't quite desperate enough to do that, but by the time Jen spotted Shirl's Drive In, we were up for just about anything else.

We ended up with
*Butterfinger Polar Blast
*Italian meatball sandwich for me and
*malt
*BLT for Jen.

The "drinks" (dessert?) were great; what's not to love about a huge cup of melty ice cream swirled with chunks of Butterfinger...I admit I didn't love it as much once my Butterfinger chunks were gone...

But once we drove a bit further and turned onto that main road that had been eluding us, we saw restaurant after restaurant that we were more familiar with and we felt a little foolish about going with Shirl's. I tried to maintain that I wanted to support the local economy, and I actually really meant it. I prefer a local shop, that's one of the reason I don't set foot in Jewel*Osco or Dom*inick's if I can help it. I digress.

We didn't get around to eating for another hour or so, after we had found the retreat location, found the actual room the retreat meeting was being held in, finished singing many worship songs and sat down to hear the main speaker.

Verdict on the meatball sandwich with apologies for the bad picture taken with cell phone: pretty tasty, and pretty hard to eat with no utensils and sitting in an uncomfortable chair with a huge belly! Those jalapenos really added the kick that Baby Spice always wants me to go after, though I'm still afraid that I must have sprayed the neighbors in front of me with jalapeno juice every time I took a bite. And many thanks to the lady next to me, who handed me lots and lots of tissues that helped me sort of almost keep my unruly dinner under control!